Linux Foundation Public Health Welcomes New Projects and Members to Advance Public Health, Safely Reopen Amid COVID-19

SAN FRANCISCO, May 25, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH), the leading organization for hosting and nurturing open source technology for the benefit of public health initiatives, today announced 11 new members, three new hosted projects, and its growing leadership in the Good Health Pass Collaborative (GHPC) to advance verifiable credentials and combat COVID-19.

As vaccines become more widely available, many countries have considered deploying a COVID credential or health pass to assist in safely reopening their economies. LFPH's COVID-19 Credentials Initiative (CCI), whose Ecosystems Director Kaliya "IdentityWoman" Young co-chairs the Interoperability Working Group of GHPC, will help ensure that these solutions are privacy-protecting, interoperable, and built on open standards, to will better enable rapid and wide adoption.

To accelerate and strengthen its COVID response, LFPH continues to grow, welcoming three new projects and 11 members including new general members Affinidi, Consensys Health, Dimagi, MTX, and Blockchain Labs, the developer of South Korea's national vaccination certificate system, to further engage and connect the right people and organizations across geographies and disciplines. New associate members include the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the CIO Strategy Council, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, the Washington State Department of Health, and the Waterloo Centre for Microbial Research.

The new projects are:

• Cardea: Launched by Indicio.Tech, Cardea provides an easily verifiable, trustworthy, unalterable proof of health tests or vaccination that can be shared in a privacy-preserving way. Cardea easily integrates with existing health systems to ensure trusted data sources for credentials and uses decentralized identity technology to enable better control of data for individuals. Cardea recently announced its first reference implementation in partnership with SITA for the Aruba government.
• MedCreds: MedCreds, developed by and contributed to LFPH by ProofMarket, allows medical authorities to directly issue test and vaccination results in the form of verifiable credentials to individuals in a digital wallet. Wallet holders can also request peer-to-peer credentials from others using the MedCreds system. MedCreds had its initial implementation in the film industry, allowing compliance officers to verify workers' COVID test results with their consent before they come on site.
• Herald: LFPH is also glad to welcome Herald, an exposure notification protocol in production with the governments of Australia and Alberta, Canada and is in use on over 7.6 million phones worldwide. Herald is a VMware-originated project and officially joined LFPH in February.

"The world needs verifiable credentials to reopen as safely and quickly as possible, and these projects are front and center in that effort," said Brian Behlendorf, General Manager of Blockchain, Healthcare, and Identity for the Linux Foundation. "A larger, more collaborative LFPH will provide a nurturing home for them to flourish for the benefit of all, not only to help us navigate this pandemic but future threats as well. We look forward to working with our new members on these projects and ones already in motion, ushering in the next wave of pandemic fighting technology that will help us seamlessly and safely move about our lives." 

Launched in the summer of 2020, LFPH hosts five projects, and includes 29 members. As part of the Linux Foundation, LFPH is uniquely qualified to help public health authorities and their partners take advantage of open source innovation. The Linux Foundation has more than 20 years of experience with open source development with participation from every Fortune 100 company and more than 40,000 developers worldwide who build open source software, communities, and companies.

LFPH is hosting a webinar this week to share more about the new projects and discuss some of the most important challenges around verifiable credentials.

Additional commentary on the news is available on the LFPH blog. To join LFPH or contribute, please visit: https://www.lfph.io.

About Linux Foundation Public Health:
Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH) hosts, supports, and nurtures open source technology for the benefit of worldwide Public Health initiatives. We identify promising technologies in order to grow them into sustainable projects supported by a diverse community of thousands of technologists, public health experts, academics, members, and volunteers across the globe. Over a dozen jurisdictions around the world rely on LFPH's exposure notification and vaccination credentials codebases to fight COVID-19 and safely reopen their communities.

LFPH is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit lfph.io.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

FOR THE BLOG

Additional Commentary on the News:

Affinidi
"The partnership with Linux Foundation Public Health gives us the opportunity to showcase Affinidi's capabilities to public health authorities worldwide as they combat COVID-19 and future epidemics," said Glenn Gore, Group CEO, Affinidi. "With our verification technology, Unifier, and experience building global interoperable identity ecosystems, we aim to build bridges between increasingly divergent technology partners and digital health passports to enable universal health credentials verification solutions. LFPH is well-positioned to shape the investments needed in public health infrastructure globally to facilitate this, and we look forward to collaborating with other members of the network."

Blockchain Labs
"Blockchain Labs is excited to be a part of the LFPH's work to introduce our vaccine passport technology to other public health authorities," said Bryan Jin, Director of Global Operations, Blockchain Labs. "Already having worked with the South Korean government and a number of other countries to adopt our system, Blockchain Labs is well-equipped with experiences and resources to provide various adaptations of the vaccine passport issuance and verification system that fit the needs of the governments, universities, organizations, etc. We look forward to working with leaders around the world to overcome COVID-19 and return to normal."

Cardea
"We're proud to see Cardea become an LFPH project," says Heather Dahl, CEO, Indicio.tech. "We launched Indicio, became a Public Benefit Corporation, and built on Hyperledger Indy and Aries because we believe in the power of open sourced projects and the open source community to transform the world. We're excited to see how Cardea will develop and grow under LFPH because we are smarter and stronger when we come together to solve challenges."

ConsenSys Health
"ConsenSys Health helps the healthcare industry operate Ethereum-based solutions for cybersecurity, compliance, privacy, bioethics and identity with the deep technical capabilities of ConsenSys to advance the healthcare industry," said Heather Leigh Flannery, Founder and CEO, ConsenSys Health. "ConsenSys Health is aligned with the Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH) community to leverage converging innovations like blockchain, tokenization, zero-knowledge cryptography, and federated machine learning to advance immediate and long-term public health goals while preserving individual privacy."

Dimagi
"Dimagi has spent the last 20 years building open source technology for public health, improving healthcare programs outcomes in the world's underserved areas via CommCare," said Carter Powers, Head of Dimagi US Health. "We've been thrilled to witness the embrace of the open source ethos by private and public sector groups as clearly evidenced by the incredible make up of the Linux Foundation Public Health consortium. After this challenging year, public health and public health technology has been pushed to the limit. We look forward to working with this group of incredible stakeholders to create the next generation of open source public health solutions."

Herald
"Initially developed for Digital Contact Tracing applications, we devised the Herald Project as a new way to pass information and measure distance between mobile phones more securely, accurately and with higher efficacy," said Adam Fowler, TSC Chair, The Herald Project & Advisory Platform Architect, VMware, Inc. "As a part of the Linux Foundation Public Health, we have grown our community of contributors and users—now reaching 7.6 million users across two COVID-19 applications."

MedCreds
"We are proud to contribute MedCreds to Linux Foundation Public Health and help accelerate the availability of portable health care records globally," said Tony Rose, Founder and CEO, Proof Market. "MedCreds was founded with the mission to help recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and we've learned in our journey how many other amazing things are possible when patients are empowered with their own data. We see a bright future by partnering with Linux Foundation Public Health to guide the roadmap based upon the public health expertise in the community."

MTX
"MTX is proud to collaborate on this global effort to promote open technology for public health with outcomes in mind around happiness, health, and economics," said Mahesh Nattanmai, Chief Business Officer, MTX Group. "LFPH reflects the essence of our MTX family culture to drive collaboration on socially relevant common causes, as we have done throughout the pandemic in supporting states and local governments in their emergency response efforts. We look forward to embracing and enabling technology as a change agent to catalyze further disruption and innovation to empower our best work for the global community."

Media Contact

Chad Torbin
Linux Foundation Public Health
[email protected]  
+1-415-548-6536

SOURCE LF Public Health

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